Blog Post 19: Video Sharing /TED Lesson

TED Lesson: https://ed.ted.com/on/H4TNxGwd

Lesson: The objective of this lesson is to provide students an introduction to trigonometric functions.

Subject: Mathematics Algebra II

Grade: High School

YouTube provides a platform for teachers to find and create videos for students to reinforce their learning anywhere at any time. YouTube has become a powerful online tool for users to learn from educational videos created by users including teachers from around the world. Another great thing about YouTube is that is a free resource to add to lessons, homework and extra credit opportunity for students to do. As a free resource, YouTube allows users to find educational videos that are engaging, interesting for students to connect with other educators and learners. The main advantage of using YouTube is students can directly interact with the source of the material by posting comments and asking questions. Students can have watch videos on lessons topics ranged from Trigonometric Functions, learning a new language to History in Religion in Art as long as they have internet access. It creates a unique opportunity for teachers to use this online tool as a teaching aide in the classroom. There are great YouTube channels that give students access to good education content in less than ten minutes. These lessons are introduced to students in a short amount of time and add insight information to lessons to continue expanding on the topic. Teachers can bring alive a lesson by using video to explain complex topics. However, it is extremely important to understand that a video can never replace a teacher’s lesson in class. YouTube videos should be used as a complement that supports the lesson presented to students.

There are three ways to integrate digital education videos for students use: 

1.There are channels that give students engaged lessons by making connections to media and pop culture. Students are more likely to remember what they are learning by watching videos recommended by the teacher in case they are confused as they are solving homework. Ted Ed lessons is an incredible source for teachers to create questions to engage students with the video lesson. Teachers can check students’ understanding of the lesson, refer to other resources and have an open discussion over the material. It is important for teachers to find videos with a less than ten minutes of length to keep students’ attention.

2.For an English class, teachers can use trailer videos to introduce the books. Teachers can use short clips of the play (Example: Romeo and Juliet) to go along with the book as students are reading. It can also be integrated into literature circles for students to show classmates videos to hook them to read the chapter. Teachers can call on students to ask inference questions, make predictions as a way to make students accountable and responsible for their learning.

3. The flipped classroom is something that school districts are adopting in their schools for their core subjects as Mathematics and English. It allows students to learn at their own pace, but they must have access to a device with Internet access. Teachers can create their own videos for lectures and they can also use other videos as complementary resources. Students are expected to watch the videos prior to coming to class and take notes during the video. Then students come to class to do homework in class, ask questions and teachers have a one-to-one with students.     

Blog post 18

Using Google Photos for teaching and learning

In an educational setting, Google Photos can provide students and teachers visual representations of what they are learning in class. There are only a few things to do in order to successfully integrate this online tool for students use. First, students must have a google account to be able to upload photos and videos to their account. One of the incredible features is for users to store, organize and create animations from photos. As a new user of this image hosting services, I am impressed about using Google Photos for my personal and professional social media use in the future. It is a good option to work across all platforms where I can easily have access to all my photos for sharing with others. It is a quick and easy way to organize and manage photos in one platform. Google Photos can benefit teachers and students because it provides a place for everyone to show visual representations. One of the main benefits of using Google Photos is that it offers unlimited storage for free. Then Google Photos gives users the option to share albums and provides options to choose to secure users’ privacy. This online tool can create collages, animations, search for people or things. Another feature is the having a personalized photo assistant that can put together slide shows, collages, and animations. However, I can also edit the photos and create my own animations from my images. It is truly how convenient Google Photos can be for teachers to use in the classroom.

There are three main applications for using Google Photos in the classroom:

1.      Grade level: Elementary-Middle school - Subject: Reading and Writing

a.      Teachers can have a “Photo of the Day” warm up activity for students at the beginning of the class period. Students need to think about who is this person/ people? What is the story behind this person/people? It allows students to develop their creative writing skills and truly explore their own creativity. It can be a less structured approach to typical writing exercises because students write what they want to write in their journals. Students are more likely to enjoy writing and develop their own voices. In addition, there are tons of places for teachers to find incredible pictures such as Humans of New York, Word Press Photo, NASA, even fashion blogs such as the Sartorialist.

b.      Google Photo assignments: Teacher can upload images and students can make comments on the album about their impressions. Students can also take pictures uploaded to this online tool and write a story that connects to the images.

2.      Grade level: Middle School

a.      Google Photos gives teachers the tools to create a shared album with parents and post it on the Edmodo, blog, teacher website for parents to see what are students learning in the classroom.

3.      Grade level: English – Subject: English

a.      For this activity, students will have about seven weeks to create this semester project using Google Photos. There are two general ideas for this project: Students can either showcase what they have done (significant moments, events, school activities, etc.) and learn in class during the semester or it can be a “This is all about me” where students share who they are, likes-dislikes, hobbies, family, and goals for their future. It is up to the teacher to choose between these two options. Students can also write a one-page essay about their learning experience or an autobiographical essay. Students must include about fifteen to twenty pictures in their collages. Students have to present to class their final project and share their collage link to the teacher.

Blog post 17: Google Photos assignment

                                                                                                                                                                           

The Next Week

J loves the winter season, especially holidays as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve.The season festivities are everywhere, people’s clothes, food, shops, advertisement, decoration, etc. Therefore, she must have to prepare to celebrate these festivities and truly enjoy her break next week. 

Shared Album

Blog Post: Feedly articles

For this assignment, I read two articles from different educational blogs. The first article entitled, Personalized Learning with a Plan of Action by Stephanie Shaw published at GettingSmart.com blog. The article is about how Ms. Shaw; a fourth-grade teacher successfully find a way to implement personalized learning in her classroom.  Ms. Shaw’s situation is similar to what many teachers are living right now, trying to find a way to integrate technology into lesson plans when school districts are providing MacBook, iPads, or laptops to all students. Ms. Shaw uses Google Sheets as a data tracker for students to enter their own grades and identify their strong and weak skills. Based on this data tracker then Ms. Shaw can review and analyze what students need remediation and start planning. I think that this strategy is great for students because they can reflect on what they need to work on and take ownership of their learning progress. Lastly, Ms. Shaw creates a table for each skill that she needs to re-taught in different ways such as videos, online tutorials, and re-assessments. She also works with small groups during class periods.  This article includes videos for teachers to use Google Docs and examples of the tables for each skill. Overall, I like Ms. Shaw’s strategies to create personalized learning opportunities for all students. Students are able to work on the skills that they acquire to continue learning. Students feel responsible and accountable for their learning. The second article is entitled, Six Techniques for Building Reading Skills- in Any Subject written by Susan Barber and published in Edutopia. The article analyzes the importance of teaching techniques to build strong reading skills in school. The author suggests to readers some ways teachers can integrate reading skills in lessons across all subject areas. Some of these strategies include asking questions, categorizing information, making personal connections with the text. Teachers should encourage students to read with a pencil in their hands in order to write their questions as they read. Teachers can also provide students time for students to choose books from the classroom library. It is a simple yet effective way to improve student’ reading skills. These books can be from different genres and reading levels for all students. Taking the time to let students read and then having an open discussion as a way to engage students in the reading but also the content.

 

Article 1 Personalized Learning

Article 2 Building Reading Skills

Blog Post 15: Part 2 Using LiveBinders for teaching and learning

There are three ways that I can use Live Binders in the classroom with students and for professional development during a school year.

1.      LiveBinders provides an incredible way to organize all the online sources and ideas for planning a lesson. This online tool creates a place to store all electronic sources including pdf files, websites, newspaper articles, videos, documents, etc. Teachers can create binders where they can share with students and colleagues their binders. As result LiveBinders are useful to foster collaboration across grade levels creating an opportunity for teachers to learn from one another and see how instruction progress across grades in the same subject. This leads to teachers knowing what strategies can be constructive to better prepare students for the next grade, especially for struggling learners. If teachers can openly share their LiveBinders, then teachers can see how similar or different their lesson structure is incorporating to the curriculum standards, TEKS, for students. LiveBinders also provide teachers ways to explore more possibilities on how to teach strategies based on collect resources that teachers are successfully implementing in their classrooms.

2.      Another way to use a LiveBinder for teaching can be creating one for parents to use at home. This binder can be posted on the class blog or website for parents to access anytime. The purpose of this binder is for parents to know what type of learning is occurring in school. They can also know about school and community programs and services for families. This binder can also include the school mission, vision and shared values that parents can reinforce with children. It is important for parents to know about the culture of the school and how teachers are teaching students how to become responsible, successfully learns with exemplary characters. If teachers and parents hold themselves accountable and responsible for modeling consistent shared values and ethics, then students can better behave and achieve outstanding results. 

1.      Digital Binders Lesson Idea

a.      Grade level: Middle School

b.      Subject: Math

c.      What students will do: LiveBinders are awesome for creating a library of resources for students to use. The binders must have at least five tabs where each of these tabs includes tons of information. For example, mobile apps for phones, iPad for student reference to use. Students can have access to the classroom procedures, online netiquette, study guides, final reviews to prepare for upcoming assessments. Teachers can upload rubrics for specific math projects such as student-led mini lesson where all students select a word math problem. They present and teach the class how they are able to solve it in two ways using their math strategies. The math LiveBinders can include  tabs for math formulas, interactive manipulatives, and videos for students to reinforce their learning at home.

Blog 15 Part I: Live Binders Assignment 

My first Live Binder is about Thanksgiving Celebration. Link:    Thanksgiving Celebration

Blog Post 14: Final Lesson Ideas

Final Project

 A subject, grade level, and lesson topic. Explain why you want to focus on this lesson.

The subjects for my final project are English Language Arts because developing strong reading skills are necessary for students to succeed in reading, writing and language for not only English but for other subjects. My project is focused on middle school students, specifically 7^th and 8th-grade levels. There are three main topics that I am still deciding to do for my final project: reading comprehension, expository texts and literature genre such as non-fiction or media literature. I think that these three topics are interesting to teach students, especially media literature since students can improve their skills to analyze media and be critical thinkers of media. Some of the things that I want to include in my lesson are a picture book, games, videos, interactive notebooks and online tools. There are four online tools that I really enjoy using for lesson plans, these tools are Evernote, Prezi, Pinterest, and Edmodo. These online tools provide students opportunities to create videos, share their notes for group projects, reflective on their learning, analyze book characters. For example, Evernote provides students a tool to create digital portfolios to keep their notes and have access everywhere on any device. One of the great features Evernote provides many ways to foster collaboration for students to work in groups. Prezi is a fun and interactive ways to make presentations for students about the lesson topic. Since I learn about Prezi, I think that this format is incredible and visually engaging. Edmodo is one of my favorites social learning platforms for students and teachers to use. It allows students to send messages, classroom discussions, create quizzes and manage progress and keep in contact with parents. The last online tool is Pinterest and students can create boards to make their group work visual and they can add resources, images for their presentations, etc.